City to finally open its new front yard

Millennium Park's price tag tripled

On the day in 1998 when Mayor Richard Daley first revealed plans for Millennium Park, John Bryan, the executive recruited to spearhead fundraising, declared the project would "be a monument to the very essence of the city of Chicago."

Bryan's words proved prophetic--though in some ways that he probably did not intend.

Millennium Park will fully and officially open Friday, four years late and, at $475 million, more than three times its original cost estimates.

The building of Millennium Park--its use of the best architects and designers available, even its expanded price tag--recalls the creation of the city's other lakefront parks early in the last century, as Chicago struggled to erase its reputation as America's dirtiest and most chaotic city.

Grant Park has Buckingham Fountain, surrounded by stately rose gardens and the imposing bulk of Congress Parkway's twin Indians on Horseback. Millennium has its towering modernistic video fountain, its glimmering Cloud Gate bean sculpture and its imposing but whimsical band shell.

The new park gives Chicago's front yard a bold makeover, and perhaps more than any other recent mega-project, it reflects the personal vision of the mayor. But as the project grew, so did the costs.

Though the park was supposed to be built at no taxpayer expense, the Millennium Park garage that was to pay the city's share of the budget still isn't making enough money to cover bond payments. Instead, the city has tapped $95 million from a special property tax fund--$10 million more than city officials initially said they expected to use.

Early on, the park's budget ran over as city contractors tried to speed it to completion by 2000. As Bryan's donors group, Millennium Park Inc., loaded up new ideas for the park, costs climbed. Just building the physical supports for the additional sculptures and amenities above the parking garage raised its price tag to about $105 million from $87.5 million.

Another example of spiraling costs is the centerpiece band shell, designed by California-based architect Frank Gehry.

Priced at about $11 million before Gehry revamped the design, the band shell's final price tag is $60 million, including $31 million for the giant metal ribbons that make up its headdress and the lattice structure that supports its sound system. Instead of accommodating more than 30,000 people--as designers at first thought it could--the final Great Lawn will fit 11,000. Another music venue may have to be built to replace the Petrillo Music Shell.

Daley says all the changes have resulted in a much better park.

"If you just did not build for the future, if you just said, `This is how we're going to do it,' I don't think we'd ever receive what we have today," Daley said this spring.

"Now, this is the rebirth of the city, just this alone," Daley said.

Erma Tranter, president of Friends of the Parks, and others believe that the park already is living up to its promise.

"It may not always occur this way, but I think in this case, the end result is more spectacular than the original plan," Tranter said.

Invoking Burnham's spirit

Daley and Millennium Park's project design director, Ed Uhlir, often invoke the spirit of Daniel Burnham, co-author of the city's first comprehensive planning blueprint and a leading turn-of-the-century architect. In his 1909 Plan of Chicago, Burnham envisioned Grant Park as a series of stately gardens, a bridge between the lakefront and downtown businesses that would help make Chicagoans happier and more productive.

Following Burnham's plan, most of Grant Park was built up in the early 20th Century using designs by his partner Edward Bennett. But its northwest corner remained largely undeveloped because the Illinois Central Railroad had been given control of the land in 1852.

Reclaiming land

Beginning in the 1970s, the advocacy group Friends of the Parks clamored for the city to retake the land. But it took the curiosity of Randall Mehrberg, the Park District's lead attorney in the mid-1990s, to make that a reality.

In bike rides through lakefront parks, Mehrberg noticed that just south of Randolph Street was a giant gravel parking lot with a sole boxcar sitting on a lone railroad spur.

"Everybody thought that [the land] belonged to the Illinois Central," Mehrberg said in a recent interview. But it turned out that the city owned the land, and it then sued the IC to get it back. Ultimately, they reached an agreement that returned to the city any of the IC land north of McCormick Place unused by railroads.

That cleared the way for Millennium Park and other projects, including a $43 million busway between downtown and McCormick Place and an Art Institute of Chicago expansion.